Sunday, August 24th, 2008...6:43 pm
Taboo Emotional States
Commenters here and at feministing had much to add to my post about the impermissibility of not feeling:
As someone who’s had two abortions, and doesn’t feel the least bit ashamed about them, I [identify] with the emotions…pretty strongly. I think there’s this expectation that i need to be appropriately shamed about my abortions, and certainly not make jokes about them. Even on anonymous message boards (Even anonymous message boards about abortion), one can’t just say that you had an abortion–it has to be justified somehow, and include an [anecdote] about the difficult decision process, etc.
Julian writes that failure to emote is interpreted as a rebuke against those who are traumatized. A woman who has a miscarriage and immediately moves on fails to validate the feelings of a woman shattered by the same experience. It becomes easier to locate the problem in the individual rather than the experience.
In those situations that involve coercion (and only those), it’s easy to see the utility in this kind of social pressure. When a woman trumpets the fact that she positively enjoys being sexually harassed, she plausibly weakens the collective will for stringent sexual harassment laws needed to protect those who aren’t quite so enthusiastic. A woman who seems all smiles the morning after she is date-raped somehow detracts from the enormity of the crime, and it will be in the interest of others to silence her or convince her that she is broken. If women do not allow one another to individuate emotionally, perhaps it’s because the effects of female emotional deviance are likely to fall hardest on other women.
So the allowance of individuality comes at a cost. But what’s the alternative? The self-appointed Trauma Police spend their lives reinforcing the idea that women are automotans for whom similarity of inputs ensures similarity of outputs. (Take her eggs/Watch her cry.)
3 Comments
August 24th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
I would like to go out on a limb and say that the majority of both affirmative and negative reactions are generally a bit off the mark.
It seems to me that the correct response to yours, and similar behavior is not judging how you “should” feel but rather judging why you do feel the way that you do.
Your individual emotional response and how it deviates from the norm are strong indicators of your personal values and how they deviate as well.
It’s rather simple, a person who doesn’t feel bad after a second elective abortion or rape is someone who’s values diverge so greatly as to cause a bit of public confusion. Who cares?
The real question is: does that person have values which are morally repugnant NOT is her moral reaction deplorable.
A callous or cavalier reaction to what is generally an emotionally traumatizing event may be the product of so-called self-negation and may also be the result morally deplorable values but may just as well be the result unusual virtue.
It may be perfectly justifiable to morally condemn one person for a callous reaction while praising another… it’s the underlying value-motivation that’s of consequence.
August 25th, 2008 at 7:12 am
To me it seems like you are talking about two types of reactions that are not so much rhetorically divergent (i.e. you thoughtfully have one reaction and these other people are arguing in a different way), but rather that in one case you fundamentally are not connecting your initial reaction to the idea of rape or abortion to emotion whereas the other people are.
As someone who also tends to have a non-emotional reaction to these subjects (regardless of my opinion about them and/or my experience with them), I’ve come to think that my tendency to be unaffected is more a function of personality than values or moral correctness. I don’t see people who get worked up about this stuff as the Trauma Police, just as people who have the tendency to react more emotionally (which I might not relate to, especially in matters of policy, but is not out of the realm of understanding or acceptance).
August 26th, 2008 at 7:49 am
You can add this to your “why doesn’t this other woman feel the way I think she should feel” file:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/my-abortion-ctd.html
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